What Do We
Owe the Righteous Gentiles?

Moment,
April 1988

In Israel recently, I
interviewed 21 "righteous gentiles" -those who reached out
to us, those who saved Jewish lives, those who were not
silent when even God could not be heard.

Some saved one life; some saved
hundreds. I listened to stories of death, loss and courage,
and by the end I was exhausted, overwhelmed from trying to
absorb so much personal history against the backdrop of the
Holocaust. One thing was clear to me: Just as we cannot
forget the Holocaust, we must never forget those courageous
individuals whose humanity transcended it.

The most distressing question
to me was why these people were now living in such poor
conditions. Their apartments in Israel were small, shabby,
often in bad neighborhoods. Some of the people were isolated
and alone. Each of them had been acknowledged by Yad Vashem
as a righteous gentile, a rescuer of our people. But Yad
Vashem's connection with these good people ended once they
had been awarded a certificate and had a tree planted in
their honor on the Avenue of the Righteous. Yad Vashem's
province is to honor the hero and the deed, not to provide
welfare. Its archives don't even include up-to-date records
of where the rescuers live or whether they are still
alive.

Because they aren't Jewish, the
rescuers weren't entitled to the benefits given to Jews who
immigrate to Israel. Nor were they encouraged to come to
Israel; many had to wait several years before they were
allowed to immigrate. When they did arrive, they knew no
Hebrew and had to struggle to find work and a place to
live.

Two years ago, an Israeli
television program revealed their plight. As a result, the
government increased its meager financial assistance so that
the rescuers now receive the same welfare payments as Jewish
citizens.

A few of the rescuers I talked
to were bitter that they had not received the same help as
Jews, but all stressed that what they did for Jews was not
for payment.

I found the rescuers through
Danny Rogovsky, a young bus driver who became interested in
the rescuers after seeing them on the Israeli TV show. One
of the people on the programs was Shoshana Rocynski, a
Jewish survivor who had been rescued in Poland by her
husband, Stefan. Shoshana was outraged over the way the
rescuers had been treated in Israel. Danny contacted
Shoshana and together they tried to track down rescuers who
were in Israel. In four months, they found 40 righteous
gentiles.

Danny arranged a picnic in
Herzliya for the rescuers. This gave them a chance to meet
one another. It also gave them the feeling that they had not
been forgotten. Through the network established as a result
of this meeting, rescuers who have a problem can call Danny
or a fellow rescuer. They no longer feel alone.
Nevertheless, many of them are still in need.

Michael Michalov lives in Jaffa
on the ground floor of a decrepit building in a
working-class area. Neighborhood children torment Michalov
because he is a Christian. His neighbors are unaware that
when he was honored at Yad Vashem, 20 Jews testified to his
rescue efforts in Bulgaria. Michalov wants to move but
doesn't have the large down payment required to change
apartments. Ivan Vranitic, a Yugoslavian rescuer who lives
nearby, often visits Michalov; "Hang on," Vrianitic tells
Michalov, "someone will help soon."

Whether anything is "owed" to
the rescuers is a difficult question. Indeed, are they owed
anything, or is the good deed itself the reward? If
something is owed, who owes it? Perhaps all of us-because
the rescuers redeemed our faith in humanity by demonstrating
that goodness does exist.

The rescuers themselves don't
feel the Jewish community owes them anything. Rabbi Harold
Schulweis of Temple Valley Beth Shalom in Encino,
California, feels differently. Last year, Schulweis
established the Foundation to Sustain Righteous Christians
in order to "retrieve the meaning of their act, discover
their fate, and sweeten the remainder of their lives." The
stories I heard from the rescuers tell what lies behind the
rabbi's efforts. Janina Pawlicka worked as a maid for a
Jewish family in Poland before the war. During the war,
Pawlicka remained in Warsaw and helped dozens of Jews in the
ghetto. When the war ended, Pawlicka couldn't get a job
because many Poles wouldn't hire someone who had helped the
Jews. She had no family to turn to, and those whom she had
saved had left for Israel or America. A Jewish survivor whom
she met after the war offered to take Pawlicka to Israel
with his own family. Pawlicka accepted the offer, grateful
to have a new home and a new family in Israel.

Henryka Kowalska, another
rescuer, told me that she had hidden a young couple in a
farmhouse in Poland, and while they were in hiding, the
couple had had a child. To Kowalska, this seemed a miracle;
she had saved three lives, not two. The child, now a man,
lives in Haifa. When Yad Vashem honored Kowalska, she sent
him an invitation to attend her tree-planting ceremony. His
parents, still living in Warsaw, couldn't afford to come,
but she dreamed of their child's coming to see the honoring
of the rescuer to whom he owed his life. He couldn't come,
he said, because he couldn't leave work.

Not all survivors have ignored
the righteous gentiles, however. The Foundation to Sustain
Righteous Christians steadily receives mail from survivors
wants help in finding their rescuers. They worry that their
aged rescuers need help.

Sometimes a survivor was
present at my interview of his or her rescuer. Somehow, the
survivor's presence gave added meaning to the rescuer's
words. In Haifa, Sofia Wieczorek calmly told how she and her
mother took in six Jews, one of whom was a little girl. As
she described how she tried to amuse the child with books
and by knitting lessons, the "little girl," now a woman in
her late forties, sat nearby, her eyes filling with
tears.

One theme was repeated by
almost all the rescuers. If you yourself didn't live through
the Shoah, you can't know what it was and what it did
to the human spirit. This may explain why some survivors
have chosen to separate themselves from the rescuers.
Perhaps it is simply too painful to remain connected to
someone who knew you when you were most vulnerable,
frightened and weak: the rescuer is a living reminder of
those dark, many survivors, only by closing the door on the
unbearable past can they create new lives for
themselves.

One rescuer told me that she
would be satisfied if the person she had saved simply
remembered what had been done and occasionally called or
wrote. But the rescued person may not be able to go even
that far. How can one repay another for saving his or her
life? The burden of the debt is immeasurable. Yet because
the survivor may feel there is no way to make reparations,
he or she may feel a need to escape the past-to try to
forget it and its hurts.

Children are naturally
dependent upon adults, and maybe that's why a
child-turned-adult can look back more easily upon the
nightmare time without rejecting the rescuer. The Christian
governesses I interviewed spoke warmly and gratefully about
the children they saved. Veronika Perochi, now 80 years old,
is living in Ramat Gan with Yitzhak Grossman, the person she
rescued, and his family. Perochi was Grossman's nanny in
Budapest before the war. When the Germans took him to a work
camp, he was only 14. He escaped but couldn't find his
family, so he naturally ran to Perochi, his "other" mother.
She hid him for more than a year in the hospital where she
worked. Although Grossman's mother survived the war, he
never forgot Perochi, his "other" mother. In 1962, he
brought her to Israel to live with him.

"He's the best son in the
world," 86-year-old Gertruda Pablinska proudly says of
Mickey Stolowitzky, whose photographs fill her room in an
old-age-home in Haifa. Pablinska worked for Stolowitzky's
family in Poland before the war. When Stolowitzky's parents
were deported, his mother asked Pablinska to take
Stolowitzky and raise him as a Jew. Stolowitzky was seven
years old when his parents were killed. Pablinska not only
took on the responsibility of supporting and caring for
Stolowitzky by herself, she brought him to Palestine after
the war. Pablinska, a Polish-speaking Catholic, cleaned
houses and lived in a Jerusalem garret without a toilet for
18 years so that she could raise Stolowitzky in his
homeland. Ironically,16 years ago Stolowtizky moved to
Miami. He tells Pablinska that he will return to live in
Israel one day, and he does visit twice a year. But she is
lonely without him; Stolowitzky was her reason for being in
Israel, and she never made a personal connection to the
country.

There have been several
marriages between rescuers and survivors. Such marriages, in
which one person save another, possess a special quality
that is stronger than affection-the partners cherish one
another. They can never take their lives for granted. During
several interviews of rescuers married to Jewish survivors,
the survivor supplied the emotion often missing in the
rescuer's account of what had happened. Despite their
financial need, these rescuers were fortunate: by saving
someone whom they loved and who loved them, they were the
beneficiaries of their good deed.

Peotr Budnik stands out as a
rescuer who is living a full life. I visited him at his
moshav, Kfar Warburg, where he has lived since 1957
with his wife Adela, whom he rescued; his son Yossi, and his
grandchildren. He looks every inch a Gary Cooper hero-tall,
handsome, blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked, with a shy smile. He
settled himself in a large recliner in the center of the
room, and began to talk. Gradually the family joined us.
First his wife, then his 11-year-old grandson, then a
granddaughter. Soon he was surrounded by family members
listening intently to his stories. Adela's brother, Zev, a
young boy during the war, also owed his life to Budnik. Zev
left his chores on the moshav to join us for a time,
as did Budnik's son Yossi. We sat eating grapes frown on the
moshav, still frosty with yeast and enjoyed the sweet
air of the country.

Budnik told us how he had taken
Adlea's family from the Warsaw ghetto and hidden them in the
forest. Budnik now has a heart condition, and he still has
nightmares and awakens screaming; for him, nothing can ever
erase the past, with its terrifying risks that now seem so
difficult to imagine. Still, Budnik said, life for him in
Israel has been "more than good." Sitting on his porch with
his lifelong mate beside him, and watching his children and
grandchildren work and play in his fields is a satisfying
life for him.

Wilhelm Tarnavski, a Catholic,
married Maria, a Jew, in a civil ceremony in Warsaw in 1928,
before the war. Because she was married to a non-Jew she was
somewhat protected, but this protection didn't extend to her
family. When I asked him why he was willing to harbor
Maria's entire family-18 Jews-he replied, "If I was going to
die for having a Jewish wife, I might as well try to save
many people." Neither Wilhelm nor Maria was safe, but
together they became courageous partners in hiding Maria's
family for two years.

When the war ended, most of
Maria's family went to the United States, but the Tarnavskis
decided to stay in Poland. The Poles, however, helped to
change their minds. Anti-Semitism didn't vanish when the war
ended, and their young daughters encountered it repeatedly.
Finally, Wilhelm said to Maria, "We have to leave Poland so
the children don't grow up with this." They came to Israel
because they knew it was the one country that wanted them
and their Jewish children. Of all the couples I interviewed,
they seemed the least marked by the war. Perhaps the past
was less haunting for them because they survived together as
partners sharing the fear and hardship.

But the Tarnavskis deeply
mistrusted religion, perhaps a mark of their wartime
experiences. They told me they believed that religious
differences were responsible for the persecution they had
witnessed. Wilhelm told me that the Nazis inscribed their
belt buckles, "God is with us."

Many of the people I
interviewed told me religion was not important to them. One
couple, a survivor and a rescuer, described themselves as
two nations who live in peace. Agnieszka Budna-Widerschal
was a peasant woman from northern Poland, with a nominal
Catholic upbringing typical of the rescuers I interviewed.
When the occupation began, the Nazis forced her to work as a
maid. She later married a Jew and then went to the ghetto to
get her husband's five cousins out. For three years they
lived together and survived the war. In the fall of 1945,
Budna-Widerschal gave birth to a daughter. Her husband died
a few months later. In 1947 she remarried, again to a Jewish
man. They lived in the same village where Budna-Widerschal
grew up. When her child was nine, a wave of anti-Semitism
swept through the village. One afternoon, the young girl
failed to come home from school. She had been pushed onto a
train track by some older children and was killed by a
passing train. At the funeral another mother told
Budan-Widerschal, "It's better it was your child than ours."
After the death of her child, Budna-Widerschal and her
husband despised Poland so much they decided to immigrate to
Israel.

Many rescuers risked not only
their own lives, but the lives of their children. Although I
always asked that the rescuer's children sit in on my
interviews, only in a few cases did they attend, so it was
difficult to draw conclusions about them. However, Irena
Landau's altruism served as an example not only to her
daughter but to her grandchildren. Irena, who lives with her
daughter, Chava, didn't remember much of her own story, but
Chava and her three sons, who grew up with stories of the
war, helped the elderly Irena to piece together fragments of
memory.

Even though Chava was born
after the war, she knew of her mother's heroism. Irena's
father had worked for a Jewish family, the Landaus. Irena
tried to save the entire Landau family, but succeeded in
saving only the son and his father, who married her after
the war. The mother and daughter were killed. Irena, her
husband, his son and their daughter Chava immigrated to
Israel in 1957. Chava converted to Judaism, but not Irena:
her husband said that she had already "sacrificed enough."
Although she never came to feel at home in Israel, what
matters most to Irena is that she is near her family. She
attends church every Sunday, and her family occasionally
goes with her out of respect and love.

Despite the diversity of the
rescuers, they shared a common characteristic. it wasn't so
much that I was in the presence of exceptionally virtuous
"good" people; in fact, they were quite ordinary people. It
was more what Eva Fogleman has described as "the ability to
transcend fear...and the ability to tolerate risk."* As one
rescuer said when asked whether she had been afraid, "At
such times it is normal to be afraid." Once the rescuer knew
what was happening to the Jews, the rescuer was compelled to
help, even if it meant risking his or her own
life.

I grew up in the 1960s and was
part of liberal Jewish youth movements. Saving the world was
part of my agenda; the civil rights movement claimed me. In
fact, I did little but participate in a few sit-ins and
frequently sing "We Shall Overcome." In their youth, the
rescuers had done what I had dreamed of doing. When the
whole world was mad, they knew what was right and had the
courage to carry it out. Although it was thrilling to meet
them, it was also disquieting-they reminded me of what I
have yet to do.

*Eva Fogelman, "The Rescuers: A
Social Psychology Study of Altruistic Behavior During the
Nazi Era," unpublished doctoral thesis, 1987